Newspaper Page Text
8A
APRIL 3, 1997 AUGUSTA FOCUS
National Commentary
TO BE EQUAL By Hugh B. Price
Economic power is next
civil-rights frontier for blacks
hreedecadesago, African Ameri
cans in the South won back the
political and civil rights that had
been taken from them by dint of
great courage, hard work and a
steely sense of purpose.
But securing those rights actually
meant that black Americans would be
able to shift more of their energy to the
struggle to establish themselves as an
economically-secure group. Martin
Luther King Jr., Whitney M. Young Jr.
and Malcolm X were only the most no
table of many who in the mid 1960 s saw
that gaining and wisely using economic
power was the next civil rights frontier.
African Americansare still on the fron
tier as we approach the beginning of the
21st century, and our journey to a place
of security and safety remains challeng
ing. Indeed, even as we take stock of and
appreciate the significant progress we
have made since the 19605, we must
intensify our efforts to gain economic
strength.
We must do this because the economic
pressures on nations, ethnic groups, and
individual families have intensified,
driven by that remarkable phenomenon
called globalization. The world is on the
march economically. Everywhere you
look, you will find a deep commitment to
free-market economicactivity. Those who
do not march in step with it are more
than likely going to be run over and left
in the dust.
This is the world that Americans, and
particularly those of us who are African
American, have to prepare ourselves and
our children tonavigate. We must spread
an acute sense of economic awareness
and entrepreneurial energy among more
African Americans so that more of uscan
be in a position to march in step with the
new globally-oriented economy.
Contrary to assumptions, this focus is
nothing new for black America. The
extraordinary development of black busi
nesses from the end of the Civil War
through the 1920 s proved that African
Americans possessed a tremendous en
trepreneurial spirit. It was just that
spirit which the Supreme Court’s Plessy
decision of 1896 was meant to destroy. It
never did, despite all the barriers it put in
the way.
Now, despite the barriers which still
exist, we must make that zest for eco
norhic achievement soar. And we must
do so across many sectors of the society.
We must husband our individual and
collective resources and invest them
wisely in order to acquire the wealth —
net financial assets — which will enable
us to lessen our dependence on income —
that weekly paycheck. In that way, we
will be able to more powerfully direct our
philanthropy to support such black insti
tutions as our local churches and histori-
Congratulations
Project Success for
your
Wallace Museum
Project
. Charles W. Walker
¥ Publisher
mFO . Frederick Benjamin
‘ Managing Editor
Dot T. Ealy
Since 1981 Marketing Director
Gloria Nelor
A Walker Group Publication ¢ :
1143 Laney Walker Blvd. Tawana Lee
News Correspondent
Miranda Gastiaburo
' Advertising Production
Sheila Jones
! Office Manager
Lillian Wan
Lavout Artist
The next millenium must
witness a comprehensive
and focused effort by
African Americans to
enter the economic
mainstream of the global
economy.
cally black colleges and universities and
those of the larger society.
We must increase our ownership of
businesses, small, medium-sized and
large; and build up local business dis
trictsin black neighborhoods, in the sub
urbs as well asinner cities, so that we can
provide jobs for residents of those areas
and truly possess the land on which we
live; and increase the number of African
Americans holding significant positions
in the revenue-producing divisions of
corporate America.
Finally, we must convince many more
of our young people that the pursuit of
academic excellence isimportant, so that
they will later be able to pursue economic
power for themselves and their people.
The two issues are inextricably inter
twined: African-American youth must
have the skills and the inspiration neces
sary to compete at a world-class level if
African Americansasagroup are to build
up their economic strength and security.
That the pursuit of economic power is
the next civil rights frontier is the Na
tional Urban League’s focus for this year,
and the theme of our annual conference,
to be held in Washington August 3 - 6.
We harbor no illusions that we can
achieve greater economic strength sim
ply by working “by ourselves.” That is
not the way it’s worked for white Ameri
cans, whether of Anglo-Saxon or other
ethnic stock. Each contributed to the
growth of the American economy — and,
taking advantage of both the political
process and the economic forces of the
marketplace, took for itself a share of the
resources. So it must be for African
Americans and other people of color.
The frontier that lies before us is vast.
But the vastness of that space shouldn’t
deter us, it should energize us. For one
thing, American businesses have discov
ered both painlessly and painfully in re
cent years that the inclusion of African
Americans and other people of color is
good for business — both in terms of the
expanded pool o. talent these corpora
tions are able to draw workers from and
the new markets they can more effec
tively pursue.
Still, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.
Let’s get started.
Opinion
NGWT ! NewT!
Where are You?
-, -“_;“..;
_‘(a . o o IRER IS Gl
&8 : ;’% R\ /
X . 2< ‘n '
: ~ 4 ! 5 i '.,"
b by ’ O
b TR 2
; i ) ,’-/ | 4
. 3 : R \?\ e. N 9N
‘ N - ! i 3 :\:\_/’_—-\
| RVCpY M=S
= > : L NN« L M "
A R 3 - N A vt A
", 5 R g \’. — gy X s\
ey SRR SRR 3y MO e AT
GSO FEINRN Y AN R b 8 . .
"7 B ~ 1 AN S\ °f IN\
/// GO A FAUNEN s*\e}:’w ) 0 A\""
s ! ROCEAR Y NN N o R :
it NNNEERL G “\‘2}3\3?/ g\&_\ o I\
i 5 EN N P)?of [N
ey : NS 47 N RN |/ A i 3,
ol 3 . AN &1 o 9 £ MR
i L W=z A N HE,
BY GAMBLE FOR THE FLORIDA TIMES-UNION
THIS WAY FOR BLACK EMPOWERMENT By Dr. Lenora Fulani
The end to ‘noing’ as we know it
ow many times have you prom
ised yourself, or someone else,
that you would stop doing one
of those things that you don’t
want to be doing — only to find
yourself doing it the next time around?
At the risk of stating the obvious, “just
saying No” — to drugs, or anything else
-- is just saying no. That is, it’s a way of
talking that doesn’t necessarily have
anything to do with activity. Which is
why, in my opinion, the “Just Say No”
campaign to discourage the use of drugs
has been such a disastrous failure.
As a developmental psychologist, I be
lieve that just saying “No” — regardless
of who is saying it or what we are saying
it about — doesn’t work because it is
based on a faulty psychological premise.
This premise is that human beings are
driven primarily by ideas, emotions, be
liefs, desires, attitudes, opinions, and all
those other “things” which are suppos
edly inside us. In order for people to
change, therefore, we must first change
our minds, or undergo a change of heart
— at least so the psychological story goes.
Like the campaign to “Just Say No,”
the many therapies and programs that
CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNAL By Bernice Powell Jackson
The WE.B. Dußois legacy lives on
e know him as a scholar,
intellectual and philosopher.
He graduated from Fisk in
1888 and in 1895, after also
\ studying in Europe, and be
came the first African American to receive
a doctorate from Harvard. He taught at
Wilberforce University and Atlanta Uni
versity.
We know him as a prolific and powerful
writer. He was the author of a book in
1903 that is often still quoted from today,
nearly a century later. It was called The
Souls of Black Folk and predicted that the
problem of the 20th century would be the
color line. It delved into the duality, the
double consciousness, which all black
Americans must face —the fact that we
are African and American and what that
means. It examined black life — from the
role of religion in the African-American
community to the living conditions most
blacks found themselves in. His 1935
work, Black Reconstruction, was monu
mental and even at his death at the age of
93, he was workingon a massive undertak
ing still unfinished, The Encyclopedia
Africana.
We know him as a thinker who believed
that black people must be given the chance
to compete intellectually and that those
who could lead their people had an obliga
tion to do so. So he developed the notion of
the “Talented Tenth” who would be the
Annie Green exhibits at the
Lucy Craft Laney Museum, now.
rely on this assumption fail to help the
overwhelming majority of people who
are seeking to lose weight, to give up
smoking or alcohol or gambling, or to
avoid abusive relationships. This myth
of psychology is so deeply entrenched,
however, that its assumptions are rarely
challenged. Instead, people are blamed
(and blame themselves) for not being
motivated enough, for not having will
power, and/or for being “addicted.”
But human development, not “motiva
tion,” is the issue. Human beings have
the unlimited capacity to develop and to
grow. How we develop, moreover, is not
by changing our minds or undergoing a
change of heart beforehand, but in per
formance.
By performance I mean the unique
human activity of going beyond ourselves,
of being other than who we are — before
we know how todo it, and without neces
sarily “wanting” to. Issuchathingreally
possible? Well, babies do it from the get
go. If very young children weren't al
lowed to make any sounds until they
“made up their minds” to do so, for ex
ample, none of us would ever have learned
how to speak.
leaders of the race. This idea was in direct
conflict with Booker T. Washington, who
advised black folks to cast down their
buckets where they were and who urged
vocational training for black Americans.
Thatdialectic—thosetwo trainsofthought
— are still a part of the dialogue in the
African-American community today.
We knowhim as a social activist and
champion for the rights of oppressed people
everywhere. A founder of the Niagara
Movement in 1905 which became the Na
tional Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP), he was a vision
ary who also became the editor of that
organization’s important magazine, Cri
sis. His dedication to fighting oppression
eventually led him tosocialism and then to
communism.
For these social positions and his oppo
sition to nuclear weapons, the U.S. gov
ernment made him into a pariah and re
fused to grant him a passport to travel
outside the country. Only afteralonglegal
battle did he receive one in 1958 and he
traveled to China and Russia at the age of
90.
His name was William Edward
Burghardt Dußois. He was a giant among
men and women of all time.
I knew all of that about him before I
visited Ghana a few weeks ago. What I did
not know was that W.E.B. Dußois was so
much more than that. He was bigger than
What does all this have to do with the
drug problem that is destroying the lives
of our youth, our families and our com
munities? It suggests that we turn aside
from the anti-developmental myth of
psychology in favor of an approach that
makes use of the human capacity to per
form, and thereby to develop. We need to
support our young people to be other
than who they are defined by the deadly
and deadening roles in which they often
find themselves trapped. This helpsthem
develop.
Development can make the drug prob
lem vanish. How? When people are
developingin theirlives —learning, grow
ing, dreaming of the future — they say
“No” to drugs because they are saying
“Yes” to so much else.
Lenora B. Fulani twice ran for Presi
dent of the U.S. as an independent, mak
ing history in 1988 when she became the
first African American to get on the ballot
in all fifty states. Dr. Fulani is currently
a leading activist in the Reform Party
and chairs the Committee for a Unified
Independent Party. She can be reached at
800-288-3201 or at www.Fulani.org.
we have been allowed to see him. He was
an African American in the true sense of
the duality of that term, he was acitizen of
the wosld.
When you visit Dußois’ home in Accra,
where he lived his final days and where he
is buried, you understand how important
he was to the Pan Africanist movement
and to the thinking of the great African
leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold
Senghor, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius
Nyerere.
When you look at his library still filled
with the 40 plus books he wrote himself
and the hundreds of books he studied, you
begin to understand the depth of the intel
lect of the man. When you see his aca
demic gowns, designed in African style
with kente stoles nearly a century ago, you
begin to understand that this was a man
before his time.
When you vist his final resting place,
you see how rewered this man, born in
Massachusetts but respected and adopted
by peopleall over the world, truly was. You
see the kente clota of kings and the cer
emonial stools from Ghana, with the
Adinkra symbols far life all around him.
We have not beenallowed to see how big
W.E.B. Dußois realy was. During Black
History Month, we csuld recognize that he
was a great African American. Duringany
month, we can recoghize that he was an
extraordinary humar being.